Let It Die’s free-to-play money-grubbing fits it perfectly

There’s this art installation called the Minimum Wage Machine. Between 2008 and 2010 conceptually-motivated artist Blake Fall-Conroy exhibited a box operated by a hand-crank, which spat out a US penny every four seconds, intended to be equivalent of working for the minimum wage in New York at the time. I take this art piece to be about how labour can be completely disengaged from utility. At your job, you create things you don’t necessarily even consume. Marx, who had maybe one or two things to say about the role capital plays in culture, would call this “alienation”. How different, really, is turning a crank in an art gallery to lads in factories making electronics they’ll never be able to afford? To collecting cocoa beans if you’ll never get to eat a Freddo? For years I’ve wondered if a big videogame might also try to leverage this kind of financial cynicism through interactivity. I’ve been playing Let It Die this week. What even are video games if not perverse, unintentional exercises in alienation? Developers build a world in a mess and you pay for the privilege of tidying it all up. I wonder, when I have a free moment away from being very fun at parties, whether a reverse of the Minimum Wage Machine is possible. Could art challenge you based on the money you spend to experience it? Can the price tag say something by itself rather than reflecting the purpose of the game’s existence? Am I, a wanker? Let… [Read full story]